You will be automatically redirected to AutoRemarketing.com in 5 seconds

Carvana buys Carlypso

Image courtesy of Carvana

Tuesday, Aug. 08, 2017, 05:23 PM

By AuSM Staff

PHOENIX -

Carvana said Tuesday it has purchased Carlypso, another disruptor in the auto retail space.

Carlypso began as a peer-to-peer car-selling service, eventually becoming a managed marketplace where consumers could access wholesale vehicles directly, Carvana explained in a news release.

The companies did not disclose terms of the transaction.

Carvana has brought Carlypso co-founders Chris Coleman and Nicky Hinrichsen on board into leadership roles: Coleman is heading up vehicle data acquisition and normalization, with Hinrichsen leading wholesale and trade technology.

Each of those co-founders are working with Carvana on strategies for centralized inventory acquisition along instant valuation offers for shoppers who want to trade-in or sell their cars.

That perhaps plays into what Carvana noted about its new acquisition: “Carlypso focused on ingesting, normalizing and organizing data on vehicles that they could not physically inspect, and scaling that process to analyze over 200,000 cars each day,” it said.

Carvana founder and chief executive Ernie Garcia said in the news release: “We’ve admired what Carlypso has been doing from a distance, and when they walked us through the technology, we realized how unique their solutions were.

“Seeing Carlypso's ability to scour disparate data sources to better understand each vehicle, to leverage that data to understand the relative value of vehicles and to turn that into actionable intelligence in real time with local market context to efficiently acquire vehicles on behalf of customers, made it clear to us that we would be a great team,” he said.

Coleman, the Carlypso co-founder, added: “When studying wholesale and retail prices in late 2014, we serendipitously discovered abnormally high spreads on some vehicles, which presented amazing deals for our customers. We became obsessed with decoding opaque vehicle data to extreme accuracy in order to find a wider range of inefficiencies in the market.

“We’d transitioned from an online car dealer to a data science company. Bringing our insights to Carvana, the biggest disruptor in our business, meant we could keep innovating with even more horsepower.”